2022/01/26 by Hansen, Jörg
#Deontic logic #default logic #logic of imperatives #priorities
paper · doi:10.4230/dagsemproc.07122.25
The sentences of deontic logic may be understood as describing what an agent ought to do when faced with a given set of norms. If these norms come into conflict, the best the agent can be expected to do is to follow a maximal subset of the norms. Intuitively, a priority ordering of the norms can be helpful in determining the relevant sets and resolve conflicts, but a formal resolution mechanism has been difficult to provide. In particular, reasoning about prioritized conditional imperatives is overshadowed by problems such as the `order puzzle' that are not satisfactorily resolved by existing approaches. The paper provides a new proposal as to how these problems may be overcome.